WAR OF INDEPENDENCE:

The Anti Europeanist (CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL, 1/09/05, NY Times Magazine)

Last month, Robert Kilroy-Silk -- the best-known member of Britain's most-talked-about political party, the anti-European U.K. Independence Party (UKIP) -- found himself being covered in animal feces by an angry stranger. The bucket-wielding assailant ambushed Kilroy-Silk on his way to a radio appearance in Manchester, shouting something about avenging Kilroy-Silk's controversial remarks on Islam. It was good that he did, because people dislike Kilroy-Silk for such a great variety of reasons that not stating your grievance directly would risk misunderstanding.

In elections for the European Parliament on June 10, UKIP (pronounced ''you kip'') won 12 of the United Kingdom's 78 seats. (Turnout was 38 percent, up significantly from the last European parliamentary election.) UKIP's stated goal was to pull Britain out of that very Parliament -- in fact, out of the European Union altogether. Much of UKIP's success can be attributed to Kilroy-Silk, who was elected to represent the Midlands in the European Parliament. He came to the party after years of wild success as a morning-TV-talk-show host. UKIP activists tend to be a little odd or to have curious private theories about this or that; Kilroy-Silk, while highly opinionated and eccentric enough in his way, was at ease striding the national stage. By the end of summer, he was striking fear into the once proud Conservative Party. It is just possible that he and UKIP will transform the politics of Britain and of Europe. [...]

Kilroy-Silk was born in 1942, the son of a navy hand named William Silk, who was killed in action the following year. His mother married Silk's friend John Kilroy, hence the hyphenated name. Robert was brought up in a tough working-class neighborhood in Birmingham. When he told me of the big gatherings that his extended family now enjoys at Beel House, he noted with some pride that his relations live in public housing: ''Every one of them lives in a council house, or a council house that they bought, and they're virtually all manual labor.''

After studying politics and economics at the London School of Economics, Kilroy-Silk was, for seven years, at the height of student unrest in the late 60's and early 70's, a university lecturer in political philosophy. This stage of his life appears to embarrass him a bit. When asked if he was on a path to a career in academia, he answered with a quick: ''No! My whole interest from age 16 -- from earlier -- was politics.'' He taught a course on political philosophy from Aristotle to Marx, but he is proudest of the course he taught on modern political ideologies, which he describes as ''communism-socialism-anarchism-global village-Daniel Bell. . . . ''

For a dozen years after 1974, he held a seat in the British Parliament for the Labor Party. On his way to Westminster to take his seat, he told a filmmaker he would like to be prime minister within 15 years. No one dismissed him as nuts. ''If he'd stayed true to the Labor Party, he'd be in the cabinet now,'' Britain's minister for Europe, Dennis MacShane, told me.

Instead, Kilroy-Silk went on TV. In 1986, BBC producers, hoping to imitate the success of Phil Donahue in America and fascinated by the phenomenon of Oprah Winfrey, turned Kilroy-Silk into ''Kilroy,'' as his show was called. It was patterned exactly on its American models, right down to a peripatetic format and topics that lurched between the mawkish and the lurid: sex addicts, adopted people seeking their birth families, does astrology work?

Women, particularly working-class women, loved Kilroy. The quality press, if it dealt with him at all, dismissed him. The Times of London called him ''the most unctuous man in broadcasting.'' But he also occasionally did shows on, for example, the international arms trade. To the smarminess that comes with the territory, he added something tougher and smarter than an American would expect under the circumstances: an in-your-face, working-class common-sensicality that made him more like a hard-bitten, boned-up newspaper columnist than a TV presenter. Indeed, he turned to column writing too -- first in a serious way for The Times in the late 80's, later in a piece-o'-my-mind grab bag of populist gripes, which he writes for The Sunday Express to this day.

Kilroy-Silk's television success might also have continued had not his secretary, last January, mistakenly re-sent a nine-month-old column to The Sunday Express, which reprinted it under a new headline, ''We Owe Arabs Nothing.'' The column had failed to draw much attention the first time it was published. The second time around, the uproar was immediate from Muslim groups. Of the Arabs, Kilroy-Silk wrote:

''Few of them make much contribution to the welfare of the rest of the world. Indeed, apart from oil -- which was discovered, is produced and is paid for by the West -- what do they contribute? Can you think of anything? . . . What do they think we feel about them? . . . That we admire them for the coldblooded killings in Mombasa, Yemen and elsewhere? That we admire them for being suicide bombers, limb-amputators, women repressors?''

The BBC suspended Kilroy-Silk and then forced him to resign.

A few months later, he was a U.K. Independence Party member and a candidate for the European Parliament. It was a natural fit. Kilroy-Silk has been skeptical of European integration since his Labor days and liked UKIP's nonconformist verve. Meanwhile, his firing had upset many viewers. His arrival in UKIP married his buzz to the party's and drew support from Joan Collins and other conservative celebrities. In the June elections for the European Parliament, the Tory and Labor parties together took less than half the British vote. UKIP's taking 16 percent and a dozen seats (of 732 Europe-wide) meant its delegation was almost as large as that of Ireland or Denmark. Suddenly British opposition to the European Union was unignorable. It was even a bit chic.

The Tories are nowhere near smart enough to figure out the appeal of anti-European politics to average Brits--they even sacked Margaret Thatcher over it--but Tony Blair obviously is. If he can't exploit it, because of internal Labour politics, then it's easy to see UKIP replacing the Tories as the main conservative party.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 15, 2005 12:00 AM